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Love & Forgiveness

Loving someone does not mean you have to like them. That’s basically the gist I got from CS Lewis’ chapter on Forgiveness in Mere Christianity.

It’s funny how often we think we have to like someone if we are to love them. To think that I need to like the people who cut across me in traffic is tedious at best, unwilling at worst. I can forgive them (at least, in the abstract concept) but I will not feel any sort of sympathy or “warm feelings” toward them..

Good news: That’s ok!

As St. Thomas Aquinas put it, love is not a feeling, it is the active will of desiring the good of the other, for the other. In that sense, we can be assured that forgiveness can be achived without having to actually “like someone.” Still, it would be the Christian thing to do to reach out to the other and desire him/her infinite happiness in heaven, as we all are called.